Monday, November 26, 2012

Recovering Lost Files from Hard Drive

Computers use different type of technologies in storing data. Some technologies are used for storing data permanently whereas others are for temporary storage. The technology used for storing files permanently are hard drives, floppy discs, compact discs, DVDs, flash drives, solid state hard drives, ROM’s etc. Among these, floppy discs are not used commonly now a day. On the other hand, RAM or Random Access Memory is the type of memory storage devices where data are stored temporarily. These are volatile memory units which loses data on loss of power. But they have very fast data transfer rates than permanent memory drives like Hard Disks and Flash Drives, as RAM’s don’t have any physical limitations like permanent storage devices.

If you wish to learn the detailed working of storage devices, you can make use of any Tech Support websites or forums.

Hard Drive

Hard drives are made of magnetic discs stacked on a spindle. The magnetic disks don’t have any contact with each other. There will be read/write heads in between the discs to store and retrieve the data. Data is stored in the disk using transition in the magnetization. The changes in the magnetization direction represent bits of binary data. The Read/Write heads use Random Access (No Sequential order) in storing the data. That’s the reason why hard disks are so fast (RAM’s used in the current systems use Burst technology rather than Random access technology).

How can we recover Lost Files?

If you think that deleting or formatting would remove the files from your hard drive, you are wrong. Deleting a file only makes space for new files to be written in the hard disk. Whatever you do, a file will remain on a hard disk. There are file shredders that can remove the bits and bytes of a file. But there is defense grade software that can recover files. According to computer data experts “Files on a hard drive can be recovered, unless the hard drive is crushed to a minimum size of 1cm pieces”.

There is a lot of software in the market that are used for recovering files. The file recovery utilities that have the best ratings in the current market are Stellar Phoenix, R-Studio, Data Rescue PC, Recover My Files, Get Data Back, Power Data Recovery etc. You can download any of these programs and use it to recover the files. The interface of these programs is pretty simple. You can check any Tech support website for detailed reviews on the best file recovery utilities in the market.